


Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Asexual Character, F/F, Spiritual
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-03-15 03:03:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13604202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: An ongoing series of meditations written by Alex and Astra, thinking about the depth of their love and the spiritual nature of their bond.





	1. Chapter 1

She is fearfully and wonderfully made. 

These are words from the book of a god she has rejected but they struck me when I heard them and I have never forgot, for they describe her perfectly.

She was the one who brought me down.  The only one to ever succeed in such a thing.  She was the one who brought me back.  The only one who could have.

She took the life from me with one swift stroke and a flare of green light, then painstakingly stitched it back into my heart until it beat again. 

She has blood on her hands, as I do.  We are warriors, shaped from the clay of two very different worlds, yet so much the same.  She fights with honor, and bravery.  She understands duty and sacrifice.  I was engineered, designed and built to be this way but she, she has chosen this path.  We have always orbited each other, a dance dictated by the pull of gravity from stars that know our names.

She does not see her own beauty, the fearsome fire that lights her face in combat, the shadows graceful on her face in exhausted repose.  The doubt, the grief, the loneliness, the anger girding her heart, they are colors unique to her.  Unique in all the worlds I have seen.  I love these things in her because I cannot love them in myself.  We love each other with hearts that ache with a lifetime of striving for something that seemed unreachable.  Until now.

I was designed and bred without the spark of sexual desire, but she, too, was born without it.  Rao, or Sol, or the fates, have made her body free of this hunger.  But we lay together at night, naked, with our skin rejoicing at the closeness, at the sympathy of being with one who feels made to match us.  I kiss her; shoulder blades, neck, stomach, mouth.  Not with the need to arouse her for sexual pleasure, but simply to worship the shape of her, to thank the gods for giving me a love who is incredibly, impossibly molded to fit me, despite being born of another species on a world far-flung from mine.  We glory in and magnify each other’s beauty.  Love transcends.

She loves my strength, my skill, the way our intellects vibrate in sympathy, the passion we share for untangling the strings that hold the universe together and trying to intimately understand the stuff of which they are made.  I had always thought of humans as children until I met her, but she is not a child.  She is a force.  She has brought me reckoning.  I am forced to revise my opinions of humans.  I am forced to revise my opinions of myself.

“When you begin to grow old,” I tell her, “I will take you away from this earth, and we will live together and die together somewhere under a red sun.”  She laughs when I say this, but she does not say no.  She knows that I do not want to live forever, not if it means living without her, my marvel, my warrior, my Alexandra.

We sleep under the skylight so that we can see the stars when we look up from our bed.  I choose to believe that Rao watches, that Rao blesses me with this lover, a gift to reward me after so much grief and sorrow.  I am not alone in the universe.  We are designed for this.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some Alex POV

What makes us one is something so much deeper than desire.

I’d never looked into someone’s eyes and felt so sure that they understood the pain I never talk about.  Astra was a cipher, and in the beginning, I could only suspect what she could mean to me if we had met some other way; she reflected so much back at me, a mirror for the isolation of duty and the weight of honor.  She could have killed me more than once, and she didn’t.  In my heart I always knew we could mean something to each other if the timing had been different.

It’s burned into my memory, the heartache and trembling hands and too much stimulants over the three nights I labored, a mad scientist in the belly of the DEO, to light the spark of life in her body again.   I told myself I was doing it to atone, doing it for Kara, but none of that was the whole truth and I knew it, even if I lied to myself, then.  I won’t ever forget the relief that lifted in my chest when her pulse stuttered to life, and then again when her eyes opened.  And then again when she spoke my name, “Alexandra.”

Every step in her path back to wholeness lifted my heart more, and I believed in miracles as she took my hand, and walked, and remembered things.  I brought her to the surface in a wheelchair and watched her slowly transform as the sunlight shot through her cells and she became, day by day, more of what I remembered.  And then when she didn’t need the wheelchair...

By the time she was formidable again, I had come to realize that I had fallen in love. 

Ours is a story of forgiveness, and healing, of ourselves and each other.  The first time she took me in her arms and held me against her chest, it felt like coming home.  It felt like everything we were carrying, all our burdens, were lifted for a moment.

She never ceases to amaze me; with her brilliance, her strength, and with the depth of her ability to feel.  She grieves her world, and her sister.  She grieves her husband, in a way, because they had a bond of honor.  It gives me joy in a measure that I can’t explain, being able to lift that sadness.  Our bed is a place of healing.  I never stop recognizing what we share as an incredible gift; that I have been given a chance to turn a regret into love and healing.  It’s a gift that few people ever get. 

Her body is a place of rest for me.  Her love makes me feel that finally, finally, I’m enough for someone.  Her generosity of spirit shakes me, each and every day.  I tremble when she lavishes her affections on me.  I have never been in bed with someone and not had it be filled with anxiety and fear from start to finish.  I never feel this with her.  I know she doesn’t want something from me that I can’t give her.  When she lays kisses on my shoulder, or across my ribcage, I relax into it, I remain open, I tangle my fingers in her hair and sometimes I cry in gratitude.  Because many times I have felt good, but never have I felt so utterly right.

I love combing her long hair, and bathing her, and massaging her hands and especially her feet, which she seems to love most.  I love to serve her, and please her, and fill my senses with her.

She was my enemy.

Then my project.

Then my redemption.

And now, at last, my love. My star. My Astra.


	3. Chapter 3

My god is far from me. 

I can only see Rao’s light with Alexandra’s telescope.  Sometimes she opens her computer and she shows me the telemetry, and I can see the radiation waves emanating in shades of green and blue and red; electromagnetic, ultraviolet, infrared.  But I prefer it with the naked eye.  Even small, at this distance, the bright little point reminds me more of the sun I knew before than the comprehensible but unsatisfying readings on the screen of her laptop.  It will ever be my sun.

The yellow sun is a different god, one that grants me great power.  When Alexandra lit the spark of life again inside me, its rays restored me and its power surged through me and made me more than whole.  I do not know if I am everything I was before, but I think I am something better: I love, and I am loved by my Alexandra. 

“Alex,” she reminds me, and I try to remember that she prefers it.  But I like Alexandra.  I have read of the ancient civilizations of this world and it is a good name.  It is a warrior’s name. 

Alexandra –Alex– says she has no god.  She tells me that this Buddha she follows is not a god, just a philosopher.  His wisdom feels like the words of gods, though.  He talks about suffering, and desire.  I have suffered long, and in many ways, many of them rooted in the desire for that which I could not have.  I desired my old home.  I desired freedom.  I wanted to save this Earth, so blue and fragile.  I never thought I really could. 

And I never thought I could have my Alex.  She was too beautiful, too fearsome, too wild and sweet a thing to ever love me, I thought.  When you are trying to redeem yourself by conquering, it can be difficult to see yourself as someone worthy of love.  When you are far from your god, you can forget that there are other kinds of love.  Alex’s love is pure, like that of a god, yet fierce, like that which only a flesh and blood being can give.  She burns.  She is made of light and heat.  She is made from the fires of stars.  When I say this, she always laughs gently and kisses my forehead. 

For the first time, desire is not suffering because I have been given that which I wanted most.  She shook me the very first time I saw her when she defeated my Hellgramite.  Her grace and ferocity arrested my breath and heartbeat.  She was strong enough to kill me.  Brilliant enough to bring me back to life.  Tender enough to nurse me until I was something like myself again.  When I could not lift my head, she held it up and fed me.  She helped me learn to walk again.  When I had lost all else, I had her.  And I still do.

So yes, I am far from my god.  But there is divinity in this connection that binds our hearts.  When she lays her head upon my chest, the weight of it stills the restlessness in my spirit.  I think perhaps I need no other god than this.


	4. Chapter 4

Sometimes Astra wakes in a sweat, having dreamt of dying.  Sometimes, I do, having dreamt of killing.  Often, I wish I could have loved her first, without the weight of the sword to show me the error of my ways.

But when I wake up, crying, and shaking, and the horror of that night floods me, she’s there.  She’s warm, alive, breathing, and she holds me tight until I stop.  Until I settle into the calm that comes with being sure of her.  I’ve never been held by such strong arms, except Kara’s.  But no lover ever made me feel so safe.  The irony isn’t lost on either of us.

I love her faith.  It’s manifest in a way that Kara’s never was.  She still remembers all the words to all the hymns she grew up with, that accompanied her rites of passage, that were on her lips as she rode, hellblazing, into battle.  Kara had less time for all its habits and patterns to imprint on her in the same way.  It’s not that I think Rao isn’t a god like any of the other gods that humans worship.  But I love what her faith says about striving for perfection, for trying to bring oneself closer to Rao’s image, through love and justice and rationality.  I prefer a philosophy to a faith, because ideas can be changed, whereas beliefs are harder.  But I understand the pull of the red god on her heart, and she’s teaching me the hymns so that she doesn’t have to sing them alone.

When two people manage to find each other who are so flawed and so wounded that they think they’re alone in the universe, something strange happens.  They become more than the sum of their parts.  She says I’m made from the fires of stars, and it’s a sweet, romantic thing to say, and I even think she really feels that way, but I don’t think it’s true.  I think that only when we come together do we truly burn.  I burn in her presence, and only for her.  The light and heat is something that happens because of a chemical reaction and with no other substance on this earth could either of us achieve it.  The stuff we are made of comes together in just the right way to make this fire. 

I think it’s because we love the parts of each other that we can’t love in ourselves.  I love her idealism, her righteous anger, her awkwardness, even the loneliness in her heart that propelled her into my arms.  She trapped herself in a loveless marriage, because she didn’t truly believe that she was worthy of love.  Even now, she needs to hear it constantly.  Fortunately, it’s easy to tell her over and over.  I hold her at night, curled around her warmth, and whisper to her that I love her like I have never loved anyone.  And that’s true.  When I look back, I used to shake inside every time I looked at her, and not entirely out of fear.  I’m not a believer in divine providence, or even fate.  But some things just fit.  And sometimes that's bigger than everything, even marriage, identity, war and death.

She’s honest to a fault and it’s beautiful.  I don’t have to guess what she’s feeling.  She tells me.  She shows me.  She sees grace in me that I don’t see in myself, that I can’t see in myself.  She sees brilliance instead of the desperation to catch up to whatever version of myself I think I’m chasing.  She loves me so purely and ferociously that sometimes I even stop comparing myself to invisible benchmarks and holding myself to standards I can’t even see let alone meet, and I just let her love me.  Because heaven knows, I don’t know when I’ll ever be able to do it myself.


	5. Chapter 5

Alex sings the morning hymns with me some days.  Her voice is sweet and clear, and I think I prefer it to my own.  But when we find harmony, there are few sweeter pleasures in this life.

I learn more about her Buddha.  He speaks a great deal about desire, and how it is a prison of one’s own making.  I had not considered this before.  I desired so many things before I died; victory, control, family, honor, intimacy.  Strange how I have let go of so many of them, and how others have come to me thanks to the fact that I stopped yearning after them. 

Desire wears a thousand faces across a million lifetimes, and some of them have haunted my own sleep, but I have long thought it was a mercy that the ache of lust has never afflicted me.  I see such foolishness among the humans because of it.  If desire is indeed suffering, it can be no clearer than its manifestation as lust among those humans who are governed by it.  The way it clouds their minds, I often wonder how they can find one another’s souls through its thick, strange heat.

 Sometimes, I am moved to worship Alexandra’s body, but it springs not from desire but gratitude.  My definition of beauty is her face, at peace and in bliss.  It is the grace in the curve of the arch of her foot, her teardrop ankles when I kiss them, the whipcord muscles in her calves and thighs.  The sun rises and sets for me on the horizon of her breasts and belly, in the well at the base of her throat, the hinge of her jaw which feels made to fit my mouth and be kissed.  The physical world was formed by a wise hand, that she and I both were fashioned to match each other’s hearts and bodies so perfectly.

She teaches me to meditate as she does.  We sit beside each other in the early mornings and match our breathing, and breathe in the world, and breathe in each other.  She is part of the world, as am I.  We let the air fill our lungs and let the calls of the sandpipers and tapping of woodpeckers drift into our ears.  We breathe the not-so-distant sea, taste the faint salt on the air.  We live in the world and make it a part of ourselves.  We inhabit each other, draw each other in; breath, pulse, souls.  We are made by gods, existing in the living, trembling present.  We desire nothing.

 

 


End file.
